I swear I heard giggling. Not much else.
Why couldn’t I simply enjoy the opportunity for a nice walk with a nice old guy? Why did I turn it into War and Peace? Somewhere along the way I had lost the capability to enjoy life. I actually wondered if I ever had it. The Italians seemed to have it in buckets.
I had intensely vivid memories of things falling from the sky, a Chinese satellite, Skylab. During some key fire-ups of the Cold War, I thought the world was going to end. On 9/11, I was sure it was all over. I’d been expecting Armageddon for as long as I could remember. I wondered about the more sensitive or neurotic among us, baby boomers and Gen Xers who were constantly subject to this stuff: how many of us trusted at all and could let go and enjoy? We had been raised on fear, and unrealised fear at that. No matter how nurturing and stable our homes, we were surrounded by fear.
In Verona, the Nazis came to the doorstep and bombed bridges. The Veronese rebuilt those bridges and life went on. In Australia, the generations of my parents and their parents went to war, confronted the enemy, and life went on.
We sat around and waited for the worst, a cataclysmic showdown of superpowers that never happened. Thank God. But you know, the Cold War had ended. I was still worrying. I was so over it. It was time to enjoy life. It surely was.
14
Ravenna
’Tis vain to struggle, I have struggled long
To love again no more as I once loved.
Oh! Time! Why leave this earliest passion strong?
To tear a heart which pants to be unmoved?
To the Po. June 2nd 1819
They had each other at buongiorno. Lord Byron met the young contessa, Teresa Guiccioli, at a party in Venice. The very next day, while her husband napped, Teresa was sneaking off to engage desires with the poet, an act that would be on regular repeat for the next four years. It is said that Teresa was his most enduring, possibly most meaningful love. Save for Augusta, which, of course, was forbidden love of the most forbidden kind.
Mind you, the love between Lord Byron and Teresa was not conventional and not without its difficulties and danger either. From letters between the two it’s clear that it was a push–pull relationship full of high drama, tears, big gestures and tempestuous make-up sex. By today’s standards, they were hardly your pin-up couple for healthy love. By Italian nobility standards of the 1800s, the only thing that was out of the ordinary was Teresa’s occasional indiscretion about the affair. While adulteries were accepted as a way of life and blind eyes were turned, society’s unwritten law was that the lovers at least appear to keep it on the down-low. Teresa was not particularly good at that.
But she was nineteen, Lord Byron thirty. Teresa’s husband, Count Alessandro Guiccioli, was somewhere over fifty. The two men had sophistication she did not—though she was no piece of fluff. She came from a good family and was highly intelligent, inquisitive and educated.
The count had a pedigree and past that gave Byron’s a run for its lira. Immensely wealthy in land holdings, if not cash, and with influence that ran all the way to the Vatican and the cunning and ruthlessness one needed for that, Count Guiccioli, like many an Italian nobleman before him and no doubt after him, had been involved in assassinations and, rumour had it, disposed of wife number one with a well-placed dose of poison.
Dangerous liaisons indeed, and Byron thrived on those. But his attraction to Teresa was not entirely the result of his usual compulsions and motivations. She was smart and funny and he felt at ease with her.
They had only ten days of tryst in Venice before the Guicciolis travelled back to their home in Ravenna, a seaside town about 140 kilometres of road south in the province of Emilia Romagna. Receiving word that Teresa had fallen ill on the way, Lord Byron followed. Ravenna was well and truly off the tourist map. Though it had been the seat of the Roman Empire and all manner of other important things, it was ‘out of the way of travellers and armies’, as Lord Byron put it in a letter to Lady Byron, and so had a freshness and purity to it that delighted him. He would not settle there till the following year, though. For months, the Guicciolis and Lord Byron were on the move, in a bizarre dance of power, passion and jealousy. It began when the count could no longer bear the prattle of the affair in the streets of Ravenna, and moved Teresa to their property in Bologna. Lord Byron followed. The count put up with it for a while then moved Teresa again, this time on a tour of their properties throughout the region.
Byron stayed in Bologna. For reasons that Byron’s friends hypothesised were likely clandestine, calculated and very probably fiscal, the count then returned to Bologna with his wife, before taking off on his own for Ravenna, leaving the lovers to make their own way to Venice together, where Lord Byron still had Mocenigo leased and where the frail-of-health Teresa could see her physician.
The trip, a jaunt through the country taking in Padua, Arquà Petrarca and Mira, had all the qualities of a honeymoon, and it cemented them together.
What gave a right place, right time inevitability to Lord Byron and Teresa Guiccioli’s union was that he was over the hurdy-gurdy of sex he’d been on. In some ways, as when he’d met Annabella, he was in a phase. ‘I am in love, and tired of promiscuous concubinage, and have now an opportunity of settling for life,’ he wrote to his friend Hobhouse a month after meeting the contessa. And in his ode addressed to the River Po, which flows to Ravenna, written to Teresa while he was travelling it, he reveals that he had sworn off love altogether prior to her coming into his life.
It’s a universal truth that when you stop looking for love it finds you. An equally strong truth is that when you are absolutely resolute in what you want and what you don’t want, love appears. For Lord Byron at least, both cosmic rules came into play at once. They seem simple laws. But like Lord Byron had to, sometimes we need to push ourselves through life’s sieve to refine our desires. It is as painful as it sounds.
*
I went to Ravenna on that first trip to Italy after the magazine debacle. I read in the Lonely Planet guide that it had very cool fourth- and fifth-century mosaics. I had no interest whatsoever in mosaics, but the guide also said it was off the beaten track and that intrigued me. It was the first month of spring then, and I drove north from Florence to Bologna, then peeled off to the east, passing through flat plains of fruit trees beginning to blossom and fields fallow yet potent in their promise of summer’s burgeoning.
Now, as I approached Ravenna in June and by train, those fields were neck deep in vibrant crops and the trees dripped with sumptuous foliage and juicy fruit. And then came the outskirts. Ravenna, like so many Italian towns, is ringed with ugly industry, Ravenna more so than most because of its proximity to the Adriatic and the gateway to oilfields and to the east that provides.
The railway station is modern and the buildings that greet you as you leave it lack charm, to be kind about it. The city bears the scars of World War II and the fifties and sixties’ craze for modernisation that swept parts of Italy. The main thoroughfare from the station to the centro storico, is a busy bus terminus. It’s a catwalk lined with not only Italian men, who’ve no doubt sat along that street for decades, but also groups of African migrants and gangs of youths who take up what bench space there is left and don’t mind one little bit if you are intimidated. Across the street a large, open car park and an ugly modern hotel exterior do not do much more for first impressions.
But a mere block behind all that is the first inkling of Ravenna’s true heart. Look past those groups of men sitting watching you, and you will see that they have their backs to San Giovanni Evangelista, a church dating back to the year 420 when it was built by a Roman princess, Galla Placidia, as a thank you to Saint John the Evangelist whom she believed had listened to her prayers from a boat in the middle of a tempest and delivered her safely to the Adriatic shore. Done up by twelfth-century monks, damaged during and restored after the war, the church is nonetheless a bastion of this city’s real character and depth of meaning.
Ravenna, now home to 140 000 people, was at various times the capital of the Western Roman Empire; the hub of the reign of Teodorico, King of the Goths; and the seat of the Empire of Byzantium in Europe. You expect that kind of back-story in places that remain capitals. What’s amazing about Ravenna is that it’s now not exactly a backwater, but certainly not one of Italy’s star cities. Yet it played a vital role in a succession of different civilisations.
On my first trip to Ravenna, I had arrived with no bookings. The centre of town is a car-free zone, other than for pick-ups, drop-offs, deliveries and taxis. I had left my car in the railway lot and wandered, asking at several ugly hotels for a room, to no avail. The first one I found a vacancy at had been the Hotel Centrale Byron, right in the middle of the historic area but reflective more of the city’s modernisation than its history. Especially of its history with Byron. So I was delighted, on this, my second visit, that my punt on booking from home (sight unseen) a B&B called A Casa di Paola paid off immediately. It was on an interesting cobbled street lined with palazzi, some even dating back to the fifteenth century, and was itself a nineteenth-century mansion with a big wooden door right on the street.
Paola, a former model, had a thing for Chinese antiques and a good eye for décor, evident in the airy main foyer out through which she led me to the back garden where my little stand-alone cottage was. The garden, which adjoined the fifth-century Battistero degli Ariani, or Arian Baptistry, one of Ravenna’s most important ancient religious sites, was shady and somewhat disorderly, full of pots and palms, bamboo and a large pine entwined in ivy.
My cottage had a small kitchen with a table, a big bedroom and a terracotta-tiled bathroom. Best of all, right outside were a wooden table and chairs shaded by the pine tree. Not so great, however, was the very loud clock tower tolling every fifteen minutes somewhere nearby. I soon discovered it was the clock in the main square, right out the back of my cottage, and it would sound solemnly every fifteen minutes every day from seven in the morning till 1 a.m. You do get used to these things, but 1 a.m.!
I also quickly discovered I was living right near the central market. I bought tomatoes, ham, olives, pecorino, basil, peaches, apricots and nectarines, lettuce and a crunchy brown bread the Italians call integrale.
In the cool of the evening I sat down at my outside table with my repast, and recommenced reading Fiona McCarthy’s book on Lord Byron. She noted that he arrived there on 10 June, which coincidently was this day, the day I had arrived too.
‘Ciao! Ciao! (insert lots of Italian here)’ An attractive, vivacious woman of a senior age with blonde curls, and an excellent figure shown off in floral three-quarter pants and a plunging pink shirt, came waving and gesticulating out of another apartment diagonally across the garden from me.
‘Mi dispiace, signora, non parlo Italiano!’ I called out as she approached, all smiles and radiance and welcome and incomprehensibility.
‘No? Oh, come si chiama?’
I knew this one. ‘Mi chiamo Julietta.’
‘Ciao, Julietta!’ She kissed me and hugged me with the warmth and familiarity of a favourite dressing gown, telling me her name was Luciana, Paola’s mother. She had two dogs, Alice (Al-ee-chay), a way-too-fat beagle, and a shih tzu whose name I never did catch despite asking several people about a dozen times what it was. That shih tzu came up to you with all the charm in the world, lured you in for the pat then, when you were feeling you and he were firm friends, he turned around and gave you a solid nip if you were not quick enough to pull your hand away. I loved him for his fickleness, like Lord Byron loved his tempestuous Italian mistresses. Such a challenge.
The thing I had discovered about Italians is that many don’t believe you when you say you don’t speak their language, or you can’t understand it, especially when you say a few phrases, and quite well; I put a lot of swagger into my Italian accent, all sing-song and rolled Rs when I got the opportunity to exercise it, so I had no one else to blame but myself.
But more times than I could count, at railway station ticket booths, cafés and kiosks, my ‘Non parlo Italiano’ had been met with the response, ‘Si, si parla Italiano.’ Yes, you speak Italian. I had just spoken Italian, therefore I spoke Italian: another wonderful example of Italy’s unique logic.
Luciana fell into the disbeliever category. In a rush of her native language, she introduced me to her dogs, appeared to tell me a number of things about the house, garden, neighbourhood, weather, time of day and season, her outfit and I think her hair, then said something about ‘mangiato’.
‘No, grazie,’ I said, believing she had asked me if I wanted something to eat. I had already eaten; the remnants of the antipasti dinner I had prepared for myself were still on the table.
‘Benissimo,’ she exclaimed and bustled back to her place. The duplicitous shih tzu stayed, intent on getting some of the leftover prosciutto from my table, which he did, then gave me a quick nip by way of thanks.
Luciana returned with two plates of poached eggs, some dried biscuits and a bottle of chianti. Clearly I hadn’t quite made my position obvious on the whole eating thing. She must have asked me if I had eaten, rather than if I was hungry.
Getting a bike in a town that ran on pedal power was like visiting a hospital in other places. Ravenna was a big cycling town. Flat and car free, it was made for it. Former Giro d’Italia winner Luciano Sambi had a bike shop outside the gates of old Ravenna and it was busy and earnest. There were a million things going on all at once, all seemingly critically important. There was the elderly lady picking up the bicycle that looked as if it had been her essential mode of transport for at least the past two decades. Rust and all, she and it were treated as seriously as the young fit enthusiast with the fancy new wheels. There was a man at the counter choosing a pump. He was shown four, which were discussed at length in the context of his needs and liabilities. There were sick bikes lined up for attention and a sea of them waiting to be picked up.
I was hiring a bike for my stay and Signor Sambi himself was fixing up what was to be my transport. On the wall there were clipped newspaper articles about him as a younger man winning that Giro. I figured I was in good hands. Soon I had two wheels again and it felt excellent—although this was my first wheel-on-cobblestones experience, so it had its discomfort, that’s for sure.
I rode my steed ten kilometres to the beach, along a bike path that ran through fields practically all the way. The old town had ritzy shops, lovely restaurants, cobbled streets and those great old monuments. But outside were high rises and heavy petrochemical industry. The province of Emilia Romagna has a generally high standard of living. But it gets it from being busy and obviously the coastline of the Adriatic is not just for pleasure. There is fuel out there. I could see the platforms from the shore.
The bike path didn’t go near all the industry though. I saw the factories, plants and smoke stacks on the horizon as I passed through wheat and cornfields and orchards.
The Adriatic at the Ravennese seashore was a bowl of cold soup, a flat, unchanging mass, quite like Port Phillip Bay, whose shore hosted our family beach sojourns in the 1960s and seventies. Dad led those expeditions on his irregular times home with the family at Lavender Street. He would submit the lot of us to his restlessness and we’d pile into the Holden station wagon for the long trip from Ringwood, at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges, to the beach at Seaford. Now there were freeways and even the most basic cars had air-conditioning. Plus, there were laws against having that many people in a car. But it was all of us together and off we’d go, Esky full and spirits up. I remember hot sand underfoot and setting up camp in the tea-tree forest in the dunes, crickets chirping, us kids drinking cordial out of coloured aluminium cups. You couldn’t set up camp in those dunes today, let alone drive in and create your own little shady hollow with the help of a tomahawk before setting up your tarp, tables, chairs and little camp fire for the billy of tea like Dad used to. It’s all protected now.
Likewise the vegetation th
at lay between the simple beach houses at the Ravenna seaside and the actual sand. It was protected, too. There were shady streets of pleasantly faded dwellings. Then there was a sliver of the forest of pines and ivy through which Lord Byron had liked to ride his horse. Beyond that there was the beach lined with the bagni: bars and cafés that rented out beach chairs and umbrellas.
The whole effect was casual and a bit scruffy, not rundown or unpleasant. It was laid back and old-school beachy, in a worker’s holiday way. This was not the Riviera. And it was entirely comfortable for someone like me who detests the idea of the beach as catwalk.
I had my lounge and umbrella, seven euro for a half day. On the sand in front of me and on the loungers in rows surrounding there were kids with buckets, looked after by old ladies the colour and texture of a deflated Aussie Rules football. Old men lay on their backs, bellies up in the air like the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There were sailing boats bobbing beyond man-made breaks and people playing table soccer and ping-pong. No one was swimming, though some were wading. Swings and a plastic jungle gym provided entertainment for some little ones.
African touts harassed beachgoers with Louis Vuitton and Gucci knock-off belts, boards of jewellery, hats, bandannas, trinkets, toy monkeys, Alice bands with devil horns attached and novelty rubber balls.
There were families everywhere. Again, I was the only one alone. I began to get fidgety.
I did not believe the he I seemed to be perpetually seeking still was going to find me sitting in the corner of the garden at Casa di Paola or lying on a banana lounge reading a book about Lord Byron surrounded by couples and children at the beach. Why was he so important? I did know that I was doing my best at all of this. And maybe that was the problem. That I was trying to do life instead of live it. Trying to get it right instead of just getting it.
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 15
